Dave Haynie
Forum Replies Created
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On the cusp of 10.0, I think I’d wait too.
You pretty much need to move that project to another computer. If you don’t have another computer, there’s a “hard work” solution, maybe. Go download VirtualBox, install your favorite version of Windows that supports Vegas Pro 9.0 into a virtual machine. Load up the project in the VM.. you have another month, though it’s probably going to be a slow one.
Depending on your project, you can get at much of it loaded into Vegas 8, I believe. Once you’re back in to Vegas 9, try exporting to an AAF file (Save As…, then find the AAF tab). This is a standard NLE interchange file. It doesn’t export plug-ins or plug-in settings, but it does exports your cuts and some other useful information. I don’t recall offhand if Vegas 8 supports AAF, but it probably does.
Note also that AAF export is missing in Vegas 9 Pro 64-bit for some mysterious reason, so you need to do this from the 32-bit version.
-Dave
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By default, a 32-bit application in Windows can only see 2GB of memory. This is actually kind of a protection mechanism. Some poor programming practices wind up using signed arithmetic on 32-bit pointer variables, and will thus fail horribly if the address extends beyond 2GB.
If a program is “clean” for use beyond 2GB, it can get as much as 3GB in Windows. But in practice, it’ll never see that much anyway. Most systems have most of the 4th GB reserved for video card and other I/O memory. And the kernel needs memory too, at least some in the the same context as the user code (eg, your app).
In short, if you find 2GB is a limit (it may be, but it’s not a given with Vegas, even doing HD stuff), move to a 64-bit OS. Sony would be wasting time trying to optimize out another few MB of usable memory when there’s a readily available 64-bit version of the OS for anyone who needs more memory.
64-bit programs are effectively unlimited in address space. Physical PCs are more limited in the memory beyond 4GB they’re allowed to access (my system here, for example, can handle 8GB… many i7 systems handle 12GB, and server-class systems can often go beyond 64GB).
-Dave
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Sorry… I used to design personal computer hardware, I can get kind of technical from time to time 🙂 But yeah, digital video really is a different language, and PCs another one still.
-Dave
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Not quite sure what you’re after here. Vegas takes clips in any format, any frame rate, all on the same timeline, regardless of the project settings.
In fact, project setting is rather like a default — you’re not held to the project settings, the end result is based on what you select to render.
Frame rate conversion is pretty smart, but can be improved by using supersampling. I used this years back to convert an NTSC video to PAL… the result was significantly better than I got from a number of different dedicated frame rate conversion tools on the market at the time. This can be slow (back then, it was 8 days of rendering, but that was on a 1GHz Athlon XP system… guess that was quite some time ago).
Anyway, Vegas was one of the very first NLEs to allow mixing of any sort of clips together on the same timeline. Today, it remains among the best at this task.
-Dave
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Martin’s also talking about an i7 (“Nehalem”) system, the fastest (as a class, anyway) you can get.. at least for a few more months (Intel’s next generation “Sandy Bridge” architecture is due Real Soon Now.. these will actually be called i7 2xxx series commercially). That’s still kind of expensive. He’s also free of any memory limits, but unless you have a very complex project, memory only helps so much. I didn’t see any increase in rendering time on normal projects when I upped my system (64-bit Windows 7) from 4GB to 8GB. But it’s also true that in a 32-bit system, you can only see a total of 4GB of address space, some of which is eaten up by GPU and I/O devices. 4GB RAM usually gives you about 3.2-3.4GB of actual memory, which is why 3GB machines became popular for awhile.
But even an upgrade to an i5, better Core 2, or the better AMD systems today will get you a huge performance increase over a system 3-4 year old or older. When I upgraded from a dual core Athlon64 at 2.4GHz to a Core2 Quad at 2.83GHz, I expected an increase, but it pretty dramatic. Full HD AVC renders went from “about 24 hours per hour” to “a few hours” (sure, it depends on effects, compositing, etc. too). DVD is something I can crank out at lunchtime.
-Dave
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I started in HD years ago, on a single core AMD Athlon XP. It worked, but even with HDV, editing was slow enough to get me liking Cineform. Vegas back then (version 6? version 7?) was about one revision away from really handling HDV well, though it did work. HDV editing got pretty good by the next upgrade, which was a dual-core Athlon64.
I think you’re ok for HDV editing. That’s not the best CPU by a long shot, but it’ll do the job. The big need for more CPU you’ll find if you do much rendering to other formats, or multi-layered edits in HD. If you’re editing from HDV back to HDV/MPEG-2, you’ll still win with a faster machine, but it’s not as profound. I was getting to the point where rendered to AVC for Blu-Ray ran 24 hours per hour on the Athlon64 machine. This was driven home when my new laptop (some years back) actually did it faster. Today I use a Core2 Quad at 2.83GHz… not even close to the fastest thing around these days, but good.
You don’t have enough storage for much video work of any kind, particularly nothing in Cineform (which runs around 50GB/hour, depending on your HD format). I’m transcoding AVCCAM at 720/60p to Cineform at this very moment… I have 4TB of internal storage, 11TB of external storage. Needless to say, this allows one to juggle multiple projects. Now, if you’re only shooting YouTube length video with a single camera, maybe not such an issue. If you do multiple hour+ projects, you’ll need more storage.
I have a wedding shoot I’m working on, two cameras, in Cineform for editing… it has its own 1TB drive. I actually have a couple of drive slots in my main PC… they take SATA drives, 3.5″ or 2.5″, basically making plain old drives work as removable storage. Large projects get their own HDD, and also get backed up on the 8TB RAID. You know your own requirements. In HDV, video is no larger or smaller than DV, but you’re kind of at the edge of ease-of-editing with that Pentium.
-Dave
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The general effect you’re trying to get can be kind of hacking in, if your menu isn’t to complicated. You have a starting menu with a multi-way toggle of some kind. When the user selects the toggle, they’re actually taken to a new menu, identical to the first other than its showing the newly selected toggle highlighted, rather than the default.
You can, from different menu pages, launch the same media assets with different parameters, end actions, etc. But it’s not common for end users to care about end actions so much, other than in the case of a “play clip 1…4, play all” sort of situation.
-Dave
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Not yet. The current version of DVD-A basically creates a very DVD-like model for your Blu-Ray projects. It’s handy when you’re building DVDs and Blu-Rays from the same project/assets, but if you want more advanced Blu-Ray behavior, not in there yet.
Hopefully, the release in October will add new Blu-Ray features, or at least let you include BD-Java code, so you could in theory supply your own “special sauce”.
-Dave
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The way to do this without cropping is letterboxing, which is usually the default. For 16:9 content played back on a 4:3 display, the DVD player has two choices: letterboxing or “pan and scan”. This is actually controlled in the DVD player’s setup menu — a user can select widescreen or P&S preference.
Most of the time, you want letterboxing. It’s possible to author a DVD with pan and scan vectors (though I haven’t used an authoring program that supports this) to allow you to decide how the cropping will occur when viewed in P&S mode.
My feeling is that, if I wanted 4:3, I would have shot for 4:3, so letterboxing is the only option. But I’m usually shooting with Blu-Ray/HD in mind anyway… 4:3 is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.
-Dave
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Whoops… didn’t intend to double-post (where’s the DEL button?).